It is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.  To explain why, we need to step back in time…

America’s earliest cultural foundations always involved a delicate tightrope walk between the forces of God (Puritans, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Mammon (speculators, Virginia Colony).

This delineation was of course not entirely clear-cut.  Puritans enjoyed making money, and most speculators were Christians.  It’s more a question of emphasis.

As eastern North America began to fill-up with colonists during the 1600s and 1700s, these parallel forces of “God and Mammon” began to rub up against one another, becoming more and more deeply entwined.

Most Christians in the USA today are unaware that the Puritans believed deeply in the theological concept of “predestination”.  That is to say, they believed that God had already decided at the time of His Creation how every single person’s life would unfold.

Puritans walked through the world wondering whether they had been chosen for salvation or damnation, constantly looking for signs of their place in the universal schema.

This is a difficult concept for us today.  Professing faith in God and Jesus while “doing good” in the world were of themselves no guarantee of a heavenly reward.

Why “do good” at all, then?

Because to do evil was seen as a “sign” that a person was being used as a vehicle for The Devil.  Anyone assisting in Satan’s work had obviously been “pre-selected” for damnation.

“Doing good” was a way of being extra careful to show all the outward “signs” of “pre-selection” for salvation.

It might sound strange now, but it was a bit like trying to “call God’s bluff”.  By modeling “Godliness” in their daily life, a person hoped they were acting-out their “pre-destination”.

This is part of what drove much of the Puritan work ethic, an ethic which would greatly inform later American attitudes to money, work, and leisure.  To be successful or wealthy was a sign of Divine Providence – in other words, God was giving a sign to His favored or “saved” people through His beneficence.

Such a view of the world is of course endlessly capable of an internal self-justification for just about anything.  The line between God’s plan and Satan’s work was patrolled by men, and through men’s interpretations of other men’s translations of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.  And after all is said and done, every American Christian of a certain age remembers the wry observation that “The Devil can quote Scripture to suit himself”.

Every event which falls favorably for a person can be characterised as a sign of “God’s Providence”.

Even land theft.  Slavery.  Or massacres.

It is this mindset which can even re-construe plain wickedness as the “Hand of God” in action.

*****

This is not to draw a simple line between Puritan ideas of Providence and Predestination straight through to historical bigotry, racism, or current “prosperity Gospel”.  How ideas move, percolate and permeate a society is extremely complex.

As already mentioned, the forces of “God and Mammon” began to become more and more deeply entwined as colonial America became less fragmented.  Puritanism gave way to Congregationalism, while groups like the Baptists and Methodists became especially popular in rural places via revivalist meetings and circuit-riding preachers, especially in Appalachia and The Deep South.

It would take twenty articles to even begin to outline the ways in which various sects and denominations interacted and cross-pollinated one another.

But whether it was the Puritans, Anglicans, or any other religious group (with a few notable exceptions), class and race tended to matter a great deal.

And across most religions, the four most abused groups of people in North American history have always been:

1) The enslaved or formerly enslaved

2) Indigenous peoples

3) “White Trash”, aka Rednecks, Hillbillies, Melungeons, et al (note that New England also had such groups, called by other terms)

4) Women

All of these groups displayed characteristics which certain types of Christians could conveniently point to as a sign of God’s disfavor.

People are enslaved because God has placed “The Mark of Cain” upon them.

People’s land is taken from them because they are non-believers, and it is God’s “Manifest Destiny” being revealed.

People are poor because “The Devil makes work for idle hands” or because God has pre-destined it to be so.

Women are bound to submission, forever deemed to be “lesser” due to their “sin” in the Garden of Eden.

And if God himself has shown disfavor for certain people, then why shouldn’t humans do the same?

*****

Most think that the history of Blackface is only a story of “white people” blacking-up, and mocking African Americans.

The story is far more complicated.

For a start, USA culture has also been permeated with the constant presence of “Redface”, a sort of internal Orientalism, in which Indigenous Americans are othered and categorised according to “white” projections of “savagery” – alternatively violent or “noble” in nature.  This is a cultural phenomenon which would take volumes to attempt an elucidation.

This piece is concerned with an aspect of Blackface minstrelsy which many fail to notice – the regularity with which “The Dumb Hillbilly” is also present as a stock character, side-by-side with “The Plantation Negro”.  What sets “Redface” apart from “Blackface” and “Hillbilly Face” is that it is mainly the latter two who are consistently presented as objects of mockery for their imagined ignorance, stupidity, and other traits associated with the lowest underclasses.

Hillbillies or “white trash” have traditionally been so far down the American pecking order that even the children of poor Italian immigrants – people like Michael James Gubitosi, better-known as the actor Robert Blake – could make their start in show business in the 1930s as part of a dance troupe called “The Three Little Hillbillies”.

People of the American heartland who grew up in the 60s and 70s watching variety shows like “Hee Haw”, probably never stopped to think that this show was a late, almost post-modern, wink-to-the-camera, sanitized version of Blackface/Hillbilly face.

Regular guest Minnie Pearl‘s character, while seemingly self-mocking instead of ill-intentioned, was still pulled straight from the age of minstrelsy.

But set aside for the moment all the “white”, non-Appalachian people participating in Blackface/Hillbilly face.

It seems extraordinary to this writer that no one has seemed to notice just how many Blackface minstrel shows were comprised of and performed by people from “non-white” backgrounds, including Black Americans and people from mixed-ethnic backgrounds such as the Appalachian Melungeons.

Much in the way Black Americans began to reclaim words of insult over the past decades, and much in the way LGBT+ people have recently reclaimed the word “queer”, it seems that Black, Hillbilly, and mixed peoples began to reclaim minstrelsy in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Again, it is no coincidence that “Hillbilly Face” has co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.

The marginalised underclasses of the world have been doing this since time immemorial – using their streetwise or insider ethnic status to transcend and leverage the lower caste social identity placed on them.

They then bend it back onto the middle and upper classes, by selling a “product” to gormless outsiders who are willing to pay for an “ethnic experience”.

People like Jason Aldean and J. D. Vance are STILL performing Hillbilly Face, but not in the gently knowing, letting-you-in-on-the-joke way of “Hee Haw”.  And what makes it triple-twist funny, is that they and others like them don’t even seem to realize it.

 

#JDVance #hillbilly #blackface

 

Continuum…

Our local once-a-year jazz project wrapped-up last night.

When considering what the USA has given the world, you’ll usually hear things like Hollywood, rock & roll, cheeseburgers, or democracy.

I’m not here to defend the merits or legitimacy of those claims.

But jazz.

As jazz legend Art Blakey once remarked “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life”.

In centuries to come, when the USA is but another in a long line of defunct empires, I hope the world will still be playing some form of jazz.

At the end of last night, a very friendly and elderly lady was passing among the tables in the lobby, handing-out a survey form.  By its questions, this survey was clearly intended to gather the data required to show the value of this music festival to the local community and economy when applying for government funding.

The section of the survey asking questions of ethnicity was a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to collect data showing how music encourages the positive aspects of “multi-culturalism”.

Those being surveyed were asked to circle their “ethnicity”.  This is the only question I refused to answer on the questionnaire, because as I’ve written a hundred times here and elsewhere, “white” is not an ethnicity.

The idea that I would be lumped into a group including people from Poland, Spain, Michigan, New Zealand, Canada, Florida, South Africa, or Finland for “diversity” figures was rankling in the extreme.

And I imagine that those of darker complexion would find it annoying if various peoples from Madagascar, California, Nigeria, the UK, Brazil, Senegal, South Carolina, Jamaica, or Kenya were collectively described as being from the same ethnic group.

This placing of “race” above culture and actual ethnicity is why I got home and put-up yesterday’s post, inviting people to pretend for a moment that “race” actually exists in the American sense.

Many readers described the man in one of the pictures correctly – by POPULATION GROUP, rather than “race”.

Most readers were honest, and said that in the USA, the people in both photos would probably be simply described as “Black”.

The boy on the left is from the Batek tribe of Malaysia.  The man on the right is a central Pacific Marshall Islander (where Bikini Atoll saw the USA conducting atomic tests during the last century).

If our identity were determined by genetics alone, both of these people are more closely related to many Europeans and indigenous Americans than to most Africans (Africa being the most genetically diverse region on Earth).

But of course our identities are far more complex than a collection of inherited genes.

The colossal Olmec heads of eastern Mexico show facial characteristics which most Americans would associate with Africa, yet they were sculpted thousands of years before West Africans began their forced migration to the Americas.  In other words, the genes which can be expressed as certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) are present IN EVERY POPULATION IN THE WORLD, including the European population.

It is easy to forget that much of Europe was probably still “black” as recently as 8,000 years ago.

If either of the people shown in yesterday’s post were to immigrate to the USA, their unique histories and identities would soon be subsumed within ridiculously arbitrary “race” categories.

I am not here to explain anything to American people of color, who know only too well that the “Black experience” is very real, even if actual “race” is not.

But spreading a wider understanding of how population genetics actually works is one small part of dismantling race-based social and political structures.

 

#raceisasocialconstruct #weareallrelated #ethnicity

Politics in the USA has been run under a two-party system over the past century.

It is easy to forget that without combined state and corporate-funded violence and corporate media propaganda, the USA might still have a Socialist or Social Democratic Party.

And no, we’re not talking about Communism or Soviet-style collectivism.  We’re talking about a party which would have developed along the lines of modern European social democratic parties – such as those in Scandinavian countries which enjoy taxpayer-funded universal healthcare, third level education free at point of delivery, paid vacations, maternity/paternity and sick leave, etc.

In 1912, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs of Indiana garnered 6 percent of the popular vote – that’s nearly a million Americans.

In fact, the increasing popularity of socialist policies at the time probably forced other candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to throw a few token bones to socialist ideas (such as the standard eight hour workday).

The mass unemployment caused by the 1929 stock market crash gave new impetus to groups affiliated with the Socialist Party – groups such as the Workers Alliances.

Mining companies abandoned many of the “company towns” they had built, leaving the inhabitants literally stranded – often penniless, cold, and hungry.

It is worth remembering that the great Wall Street crash came just 8 years after the largest armed uprising in American history outside the Civil War – the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which attempts to unionise the coalfields of SW West Virginia led to a five-day pitched battle between over 10,000 coal miners and around 3000 company-backed strikebreakers and law enforcement officers which left between 50 and 100 miners dead.

The uprising was eventually suppressed by the intervention of 27,000 members of the army/National Guard.

Most mountain folks weren’t out-and-out socialists in the commonly understood political sense.

They were just very clear-eyed about who was community, and who was the enemy.

They most certainly were NOT friends of unimpeded capitalism, coal barons, and Big Business.

It would take decades of concerted and constant anti-socialist indoctrination to mostly erase this proud history of cross-ethnic solidarity and mountain activism from the general consciousness, eventually allowing modern venture capitalists like J. D. Vance to make his ridiculous proclamations of having an affinity with “hillbilly culture”.

 

#jdvance #hillbilly #socialism #unionism

 

 

 

The image shown is the family tree of J. D. Vance, Trump’s pick as GOP running mate in this November’s election.

I’ll explain the funny little flag symbols at the end of this shortish piece…

Aside from being Trump’s new poodle, J. D. Vance is the author of the notorious New York Times bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” published by Harper about 8 years ago, which was made into a film, and has re-entered the bestseller lists this week.

This book is a political manifesto thinly disguised as a memoir, and was lapped-up like milk and nectar by the urban chattering classes, who believed they had found their “man on the inside”, someone able to explain why an entire segment of American “white folks” seemed so singularly unable to lever their “white privilege” in economic terms.  Even worse, while suffering the same economic conditions historically endured only by Black and indigenous Americans, these “white folks” seemed to insist on voting for conservative political candidates.

How could this be?

In his book, Vance claimed to be a “hillbilly” descended from “Scots-Irish” people, before proceeding to punch-down hard from his position as a venture capitalist supported by pseudo-Libertarian billionaires like Peter Thiel.  Vance essentially blamed 20th century Appalachian poverty on an inherited and unadapting “Scots-Irish” culture, and more recently, on a resigned and work-shy, “let’s live on food stamps” mindset.

Vance’s knowledge of the economic and ethnic history of Appalachia is not just limited – it is flat-out wrong.

In fact, his knowledge of HIS OWN ANCESTRY is even less informed – but that doesn’t stop him from developing an entire sociological thesis based on what looks like a quick Google search of his surname origins.

Southern Appalachia has been one of the most ethnically mixed places in the USA since the 1770s, and almost no one with deep roots there can legitimately claim that “Scots-Irish” forms the greater part of their genetic inheritance.  This is a fact which can be backed-up with hard data, whatever the faceless editors of Wikipedia pages, and propagandists for a “white” history of Appalachia might claim.

 

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People with a far better grasp of history than J. D. Vance seem to have absorbed the ideas of writers like David Hackett Fischer (author of Albion’s Seed) and used these ideas as a springboard for the construction of an imaginary “Scots-Irish” identity.  Fischer is a serious historian, but his vision of who first settled the American frontier has some serious blind spots.

Here’s how it works:

Pick a remote ancestor from your family tree with the ethnic identity you prefer.  Vance has ancestors who have been in America for centuries, so he has 16 second great grandparents who were born in America during the 1800s.  Let’s ignore the fact that NOT ONE of these 16 second great-grandparents can be proven to descend from Ulster folk – aka the “Scots-Irish”.

Ignore the fact that even if Vance had one second great-grandparent with a great-grandparent from Northern Ireland, this one single remote ancestor would still represent only a miniscule percentage of his overall genetic inheritance.

Of course “genetic inheritance” is only a tiny part of who we are.  Our cultural environment has far, far more to do with our identity.

In Vance’s case, he would like to believe he is “Scots-Irish” both by blood and culture – perhaps because in the imagination of many insecure “white” American males, such a background speaks to their idealised, “white” Christian nationalist aspirations and preferred virtues.

Fighting for honour?  Scots-Irish.  Stubborn and independent?  Scots-Irish.  Clannish?  Mistrustful of government?  Loyal to a fault?  Why, those are “Scots-Irish” things, of course.

I’ll stop right there, and let you read quotes which Vance included and seemed to endorse in his book “Hillbilly Elegy”:

“In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else. This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits – an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country – but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

This sort of palpable nonsense is problematic and dangerous on multiple levels.

Number 1, Appalachia is NOT primarily Scots-Irish, and Vance certainly isn’t primarily “Scots-Irish” by genetic or even cultural inheritance.  Not even close.

How do I know this?  By spending twenty years tracing the ethnic roots of heartland America.  Vance is a distant cousin on multiple lines, and I happen to be aware of who “his people” really were, because they are “my people”.

Number 2, the persistence of certain cultural traits in 21st century Appalachia has nothing to do with any continuity of a “Scots-Irish” subculture from the 1700s.

Every single trait Vance sees as “Scots-Irish” might equally apply to Appalachians of Welsh, German, English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Jewish, Romani, or indeed, Cherokee, Shawnee, or African ancestry.  One might quite rightly speak of “Appalachian” or “Mountain” culture, but this culture is the product of DIVERSITY and centuries of inter-ethnic mixing.

There is actually IS one aspect of “Scots-Irish culture” seen in America which might be described as especially “Ulster Protestant”, but self-identified “Scots-Irish” people rarely mention it.

This would be a familiarity with the actual mechanics of colonialism, and how to use violence to maintain economic supremacy over a disenfranchised indigenous population…the “Scots-Irish” did it first in Ulster, and many did it later on the Appalachian frontier.  Read up on “The Paxton Boys” for an introduction to this subject.

Number 3, this elevation of traits supposedly unique to the “Scots-Irish” is just another, more subtle face of an older American belief in race and race eugenics.

Instead of attributing certain local traits and behaviors to the complex cultural environment created during the violence of the frontier era, people like Vance just call it innate “Scots-Irishness”.

This is all a bit reminiscent of those old newspaper horoscopes which were always intentionally vague – so people could always find a way to relate the words to their own circumstances…

Instead of looking at Appalachia’s past and current problems through the lens of racism, reliance on hunting and subsistence farming, bad economic policies, poor infrastructure, corporate pillage of resources, and revivalist religion creating a legacy of poor education going back to frontier times, let’s just call it “Scots-Irish hillbilly culture”.

In other words, Vance and other charlatans like him – even when using the word “culture” instead of “race”- actually want to believe that certain things are exclusive to certain groups.  That certain things are “in their blood”.

This sort of fake history, this cherry-picking of ancestors, this claiming of “true American values” as being mainly synonymous with only certain groups, this, this, bullshit quite frankly- it goes to the very heart of the current social and ideological divisions seen in the USA.  The center can no longer hold.

Half of America wants to grow-up and confront the past with open eyes in order to move forward in a fact-based reality.

The other half wants to drag everyone into a world based on a conjured reality – a world of propaganda and historical whitewashing, a world of jingoism, blind nationalism, and Christian faith.

This is why politicians are banning books.  This is why American history teachers are being put under pressure with new restrictive legislation, why Florida’s current governor now endorses new history books claiming that African-American slaves actually benefitted from enslavement in certain ways.

White Christian Nationalists want to “own” American history, and by extension, they can then “own” American identity itself.

And when the facts don’t match their fake identity, they will simply lie, or attack the person laughing at The Emperor’s New Clothes.

After all, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”, as George Orwell warned in his famous novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four“.

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I’ve given so much time to Vance’s claims of so-called “Scots-Irish” ancestry because many, many people who claim this identity in Appalachia are fully as multi-ethnic as anyone else there.

And this includes people like J. D. Vance, who is happy to embrace a scant, possibly non-existent ethnic component of his “white” ancestry to suit an ideological political narrative, while ignoring his closer ties to the mixed-ethnic “Carmel Indians” of Ohio and other brown people of Eastern Kentucky like the Melungeons.

This does a great, a serious disservice, to the complexity and fascinating real history of the region – and an even worse disservice to truth.

It is White Christian Nationalist propaganda worthy of anything spoken by German National Socialists about “pure Aryan” people back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Never, ever, become a book-burner. But after you’ve read “Hillbilly Elegy“, make sure to place it firmly in the “fiction” section of your book collection.

Now.  About the symbols in the Vance pedigree.

The modern national flags are only meant to give a general indication of the predominant ancestry on each line. But even the people behind, say, an English flag will be mixed to some degree.

You will note the complete absence of any flag indicating Ulster or “Scots-Irish” ancestry.

The little circular “Before We Were White” logo indicates lines with “Melungeon” or what I call “Old Mix American” people – meaning people of non-Northern or Central European background:

Indigenous American, sub-Saharan African, Malagasi, South Asian Indian, North African, Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jewish, Romani, and others.

The fact that J. D. Vance is not “Scots-Irish”, and has innumerable “non-white” ancestors is not important in and of itself.

What matters profoundly is the attempt by Vance and the GOP to rewrite history in an effort to make it match a White Christian Nationalist ideology.

Whether Vance or Trump believe this stuff is beside the point.

They will use it to mobilise a section of the American people large enough to bring down democracy.

 

#jdvance #fakehillbilly